COUNTRY LOVING

Rural life isn’t always idyllic, especially when it comes to dating…

“NEVER WRESTLE WITH A PIG. YOU BOTH GET DIRTY – but the pig enjoys it.” The words were scarcely out of my mouth before I regretted them. It’s one of my favourite sayings, but my handsome neighbour, Matthew Antiza, wasn’t amused at all.

I said it two weeks ago, when the cherry tree beside the farmyard had just blossomed, so petals blew around us like pink snow. A few minutes earlier, I’d been scraping dung off the concrete when a piglet skidded around the corner. It was white with black spots and a merry expression, and it hesitated briefly before flinging itself into the muck heap. Simultaneously, two men appeared in pursuit, one of them being Matthew.

I’d encouraged a group of villagers to start a pig cooperative on the farm following a recent discussion at the village fair about the lack of good local pork, but this was the first I knew that any livestock had arrived. I also wanted to talk to Matthew about a letter he’d sent me, which had been eaten by mice before I could read it, so as the two men wrestled with the escapee, I searched for a conversational opener. And got it wrong. Matthew, almost unrecognisably covered in filth, muttered, “None of us are enjoying this,” as they disappeared off. Still, I comforted myself by thinking that at least I now had an excuse to bump into him again.

So I began dropping in on the pigsty at odd moments. It was surprisingly pleasurable because the cooperative members, though kind and hard-working, ran the enterprise so differently to the way a farmer would. For instance, the first time I visited, a teaching assistant, in a pencil skirt and heels, was putting up name-boards for the three pigs (Trotsky, Hamlet and Pjork). The next day, Matthew’s fellow pig-wrestler was lobbing vegetables from his allotment into the sty (such a relief to get rid of those Jerusalem artichokes) and there was no shortage of emotional bonding, with people scratching the pigs using handcrafted sticks, talking to them, even singing. And, of course, they took piglet selfies. I’d find families beaming into a smartphone while Trotsky, Hamlet and Pjork rootled in the background.

I didn’t see Matthew, though, and was told he was abroad on business. And then the rain began. For days it poured, and the only cooperative members I saw were in oilskins, hurriedly tipping feed into a trough. Today I noticed that water was pooling in front of the sty, so I cleared out a drain to shift it. And then I realised the piglets’ sleeping quarters were wet. One thing my late husband impressed on me was that pigs need warm, dry beds. On the first farm he worked on, they once lost 300 sows to pneumonia and he never forgot it. But the reason I don’t keep them myself is that the old sty is hard to clean. Basically, you have to crawl inside and use a hand-shovel. It’s no fun on a dry day – and horrific on a wet one when you’re being hindered by baby animals desperate to be played with. I was trying to discourage Pjork (or maybe it was Hamlet) from biting my feet when I heard someone cough politely outside. I emerged, dripping with mud, to discover it was Matthew.

“What were you up to in there?” he asked, as if I’d chosen to creep about inside a wet sty for fun.

“Pigs don’t just need selfies, you know,” I said, brandishing my shovel. “They have to be cleaned out, too.”

“Isn’t that a rural saying, too?” he said, laughing. When we’d both stopped giggling, I mentioned the letter and he said not to worry about it. He hasn’t mentioned another date, though…

‘Woman seeks man into Communism, Shakespeare and Icelandic music’